Tom Waits told me, a few years back, about his fondness for hotels named after obscure American presidents. "Take me to the Taft!" he'd instruct the cabbie, because "you could usually rely on finding a Taft in every town". For Waits, establishments like the Taft (or the Cleveland, the McKinley, the Harrison) are a crucial site of fresh material – faded, chintzy, last-chance saloons inhabited by lost souls with tales to tell. "You walk in and there they are: the old men in the lobby."

I'd love to be the sort of footloose adventurer who checks into the Taft. But by and large I've found that the beds are too lumpy and the plumbing too garrulous, while the old men in the lobby are more likely to creep me out than regale me with tall tales of Big Joe and Phantom 309. Nor, for that matter, am I especially comfortable in idyllic, mom-and-pop guest houses, because they make me feel like an intruder in someone else's house; constantly on my best behaviour; forever on the brink of some ghastly social faux pas. Yes, I do try – whenever I can – to support the independent, family-run business. Yet sneakily, shamefully, I'd always rather lay my head at the chain hotel. Beneath this romantic, buccaneer exterior beats the heart of a travelling sales rep – tired, set in his ways and in dire need of a trouser press.

Worse, I suspect that I like chain hotels for all the reasons that most right-thinking people hate them. Because they are drab and anonymous. Because they are cut off from their surroundings and because (once inside) you might just as easily be on the outskirts of Kettering as the outskirts of Wichita. Towns can be bleak and the scenery too attention-seeking. But my blood thrills at the sight of a four-square Premier Inn sat beside the A-road, or the humble Travelodge, nestled in the verdant green of the motorway service station.

Perversely, I've always felt there's something exotic and otherworldly about these places. It's as though their very sterility makes them the ideal blank canvas; a fascinating limbo. Down the years I've conversed with an ancient Korean war veteran in a Holiday Inn in Virginia, shared a table with a drunken band of circus performers at a Formule 1 in Cahors and been buttonholed by a self-styled fugitive from justice in a Louisiana Best Western (he was later ejected after trying to smuggle his dog in via the fire door). The night clerk at the Hampton Inn, outside a misbegotten town in upstate New York, turned out to be a well-spoken English woman who came to America to attend the Woodstock festival and never found her way back home. Perhaps none of these people can hold a candle to the old men at the Taft. But I'm glad to have met them and I know where to find them. They're out on the margins, living on the edge, somewhere between the soap dispenser and the all-you-can-eat buffet.